RMME faculty member, Dr. Chris Rhoads, will deliver a (virtual) keynote address at the LEAD retreat on April 16, 2021. The title of his talk is: Research Design for Educational Effectiveness Studies:  Statistical and Practical Considerations. The LEAD retreat is sponsored by the LEAD Graduate School and Research Network, which is based in Tubingen, Germany.

RMME/STAT Joint Colloquium:

The Bayesian Causal Forest Model: Regularization, Confounding, and Heterogeneous Effects

Richard Hahn
Arizona State University

January 29, 2021, at 12:00 EST

https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/uconn-cmr/j.php?MTID=mc19e545b14cc3a980ffc36760a5ce5f4

This talk will describe recent work on Bayesian supervised learning for conditional average treatment effects. Dr. Hahn will motivate the proposed Bayesian causal forest model in terms of fixing two specific flaws with previous approaches. One, our model allows for direct regularization of the treatment effect function, providing lower variance estimates of heterogeneous treatment effects. Two, by including an estimate of the propensity score as a control variable in our model we mitigate a phenomenon called “regularization induced confounding” that leads to substantial bias in previous approaches. Dr. Hahn will conclude with a detailed discussion of designing simulation studies to systematically investigate and validate machine learning models for causal inference.

Note: Dr. Hahn may also talk about this tutorial: https://math.la.asu.edu/~prhahn/xbcf_demo.html

Register Now! RMME faculty member, Dr. Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead will give a 3-module workshop in January 2021, sponsored by Encompass Learning Center.

This workshop will focus on best practices for combining different evaluation methods or frameworks. It is open to evaluators working all over the globe.

As a continuation of the presentation series this fall, the University of Connecticut’s Research Methods, Measurement, & Evaluation (RMME) program and Statistics department will jointly sponsor several additional RMME/STAT colloquia, starting in January of 2021. So, mark your calendar now! And as always, be sure to check the RMME website for more information as these talks approach!

1/29/2021	12:00-1:15pm EST	P. Richard Hahn	Arizona State University
2/26/2021	12:00-1:15pm EST	Edward Ip	Wake Forest University
3/26/2021	12:00-1:15pm EST	David Dunson	Duke University
4/16/2021	12:00-1:15pm EST	Susan Paddock	NORC University of Chicago
4/23/2021	2:00-3:15pm EST	Jean-Paul Fox	University of Twente
5/21/2021	12:00-1:15pm EST	David Kaplan	University of Wisconsin-Madison
9/10/2021	12:00-1:00pm EST	Susan Murphy	Harvard University